Why does someone always want to rain on the parade? Here are countless people and pets—my household very much included—enjoying perfectly wonderful and healthy nights together, when some buzzkill at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention starts throwing around zoonoses and pathogens, even bubonic plague!

I read about the C.D.C study warning about the risks of pets in your bed in The New York Timesand wondered, don’t these researchers have anything better to do? I can’t believe that the “risks” outweigh the emotional and physiological benefits of keeping our pets close. I’m all for precautions, as much for my dogs as for me. No fleas or ticks allowed. No licking wounds. No biting. No open-mouth kissing.

If anything worries me, it’s the sleep I lose on nights when the dogs are stealing the covers or inching too far into my real estate. For that, they get kicked to the curb.